


my love took me down to the river to silence me

by celestialbisexual



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Multi, Post-Harrow the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy), The River - Freeform, a couple times, and almost getting eaten by ghosts, terrible old people being terrible and kissing each other a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:47:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26517679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestialbisexual/pseuds/celestialbisexual
Summary: Cytherea is waiting for you at the River. She’s got a little boat tied to a stake at the water’s edge, and she’s wearing a frankly ridiculous sunhat. She waves you down as you approach, as if there’s any chance of you missing her.“Well” she says, smiling her million-watt smile, “you fucked that one up rather spectacularly.”“You’re one to talk.” You snap. “You got murdered by a toddler with a bone fetish.”“I missed you too, Mercy.” Cytherea says, and rises up on her tiptoes to kiss both your cheeks. “Now come along, we’ve got a very busy afterlife ahead of us.”
Relationships: Mercymorn the First/Augustine the First, Mercymorn the First/Cytherea the First, Mercymorn the First/Cytherea the First/Augustine the First
Comments: 23
Kudos: 81





	my love took me down to the river to silence me

Cytherea is waiting for you at the River. She’s got a little boat tied to a stake at the water’s edge, and she’s wearing a frankly ridiculous sunhat. She waves you down as you approach, as if there’s any chance of you missing her. 

“Well” she says, smiling her million-watt smile, “you fucked that one up rather spectacularly.” 

“You’re one to talk.” You snap. “You got murdered by a toddler with a bone fetish.” 

“I missed you too, Mercy.” Cytherea says, and rises up on her tiptoes to kiss both your cheeks. “Now come along, we’ve got a very busy afterlife ahead of us.” 

* * *

Cytherea seems to be in much better health now that she’s properly dead, but she still makes you do all of the rowing, because she’s a massive bitch. Your rowboat is covered in ghost wards, but the inhabitants of the River are still desperate to get inside, and you spend as much time beating them back as you do rowing.

“How are we still so… coherent?” You ask her. “We should be more like those weird fucks, and less like…”

You search for the right words, but Cytherea understands. “People? I’d consider us more like necromantic abominations than people, but- no don’t interrupt me I’m not having this conversation with you again- I understand what you mean. It’s all very complicated, but the long and short of it is that your  _ toddler with a bone fetish _ figured out how to create bubbles in the River. I took her theory and improved upon it, and now we can travel as we need to.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but Cytherea dismisses all of it with a dainty shrug. “Honestly, I’m not sure if it would work normally, but there’s all kinds of  _ fate  _ and  _ necessity  _ being bandied about these days, and it’s fucking with the rules quite a bit.” 

“How narratively convenient.” You say, and stab the oar at another ghoul, neatly decapitating it.

“Don’t get meta, dear, it’s not charming.” Cytherea says primly, and turns her back to you, gazing out at the water in a way that you’re certain she thinks is terribly romantic. You splash her, and the skeleton who climbs into the boat and tries to strangle you as a result is completely worth it. 

* * *

“I’m surprised you haven’t asked me where we’re going.”

“I just know you’ll say something unbearably smug and pretentious, and I don’t want to give you the satisfaction.”

“You never were any fun at all, Joy.” 

“Thank you Charity.”

* * *

“All right then. Where are we going?”

“To the end and the beginning of all things.”

“I fucking hate you.”

* * *

Time is… difficult, on the River, but it’s been at least a few hours when Cytherea calls for you to halt and make camp on the banks. 

“We’ll rest here for the night.” She says, and you look up at the eternally stone grey sky, and raise an eyebrow.

She shrugs. “If we don’t sleep we’ll go mad faster, and we’ll need to hold on to ourselves for as long as we can.”

You nod, remembering what Harrow had done after 86 hours awake, and stretch out on the barren earth of the River banks, wadding your robe up under your head as a pillow. 

You close your eyes, and are unsurprised when you feel Cytherea’s weight settle on top of you. 

“Mercy.” She croons, drawing out your name so that it’s almost a whine. She pokes your nose, and you smile despite yourself.

“Is this part of our grand mission too?” You ask, not opening your eyes. “Another way to stave off madness?”

“No.” Cytherea admits. “I just missed you.” 

She’s teasing you, as always, but there’s an undercurrent of honesty in it too. You’re reminded, suddenly and uncomfortably, of Cristabel, of how she could never tease you for too long without reassuring you that she loved you. 

You open your eyes and flip Cytherea onto her back, swallowing her delighted squeal, and all the ones that follow.

* * *

In the morning, Cytherea grows a comb out of her radius, and carefully combs out and pins up her hair. 

“Would you like me to do yours?” She asks. “It’s gotten a bit… wild.”

You snort. “And who’s fault was that?”

“Mine.” She replies, utterly shameless, and then gestures for you to turn your back to her. You hadn’t been planning on letting her brush your hair, it made you feel much too much like a child, but Cytherea had always had a way of cheerfully blowing past all your boundaries, and so you turn your back. 

“Do you remember when Cristabel tried to dye Cassie’s hair blue?” She asks quietly, “and it all turned green and fell out?”

You laugh quietly. “Cristabel hid in our room for a week, and wouldn’t come out for anything.”

Cytherea hums, and sets about plaiting your hair into a practical braid. 

“You shouldn’t have gone back.” You say suddenly.

“I couldn’t let him make more Lyctors.” Cytherea replies. “Wake’s plan had already failed, and the last thing we needed was more immortal soldier’s for God’s army.”

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t have killed them, but you could have been subtler about it. Shuttle explosions, poison, mysterious diseases. There was no reason for you to go back.” You pull away from her gentle hands, and turn to face her, staring into Loveday’s eyes. “You were just trying to die, and you couldn’t bear not doing it in the most dramatic way possible.” 

“Well that was certainly a factor.” Cytherea admits, and then laughs at whatever rage must be showing on your face. “Oh, I’m sorry, was I supposed to be upset that you figured that out? I’m Seventh, darling, melodrama and melanoma are our claims to fame.” 

You rise abruptly and make for your little boat. “We should get going.”

Cytherea rises too, and wraps her arms around your waist from behind, pressing her chest to your back.

“Don’t be cross with me, Mercy.” She whispers into your spine, pressing kisses to your shoulder blades.”

You pull away. “I’m not ‘cross’, Cytherea, I don’t give a shit that you decided to turn your suicide into a space opera, I only give a shit that it made my life harder. Can we please get this fucking show on the road?”

Cytherea sighs, as though you’re the one being ridiculous, but she nods, and gets into the boat. You row in silence for several blissful hours. 

Finally, Cytherea huffs dramatically, and points a finger at you. “You  _ are _ cross with me, and after I specifically asked you not to be!” 

You roll your eyes, and focus on using your oar to hack at the halfway-defleshed ghoul currently clinging to the side of the boat, making it rock a great deal more than you’re comfortable with. It would be an easier task if there weren’t two other revenants attempting to use their companion as a kind of ladder, and if your sister Lyctor had even the slightest sense of timing.

“Mercy, I am talking to you!”

“And I am trying to keep us from being torn apart by skeletons, Cytherea, so let’s maybe put your thing on the backburner for just a moment!” You snap. Cytherea screws up her face in concentration, and one of the three revenants goes stiff abruptly, and then sets about tearing apart the other two.

“Can we talk about how unfair you’re being to me now?” Cytherea asks when you’re free of the three revenants. 

“You couldn’t have done that earlier?” You demand. 

“I’ve been maintaining the ghost wards! It’s very taxing.” Cytherea replies, which... okay, fair enough. “And in any case I was acting under the assumption that you were  _ also a necromancer _ , and would perhaps attack the revenants that way rather than simply hacking at them with an oar. Which I’m sure has been just wonderful for releasing tension, but is not actually particularly efficient.” 

You can’t argue with that logic, but you’ve never let that stop you before, and so you say, “I’m not being unfair to you. You went and got yourself killed, and then I was trapped on the Mithraeum with Gideon and John and  _ Augustine,  _ not to mention two shitty toddlers, one of whom had Alecto’s eyes. It was a very stressful time, and it all might have been avoided if you’d spoken to me about  _ literally any aspect _ of your shitty plan before implementing it.”

“I didn’t want you to talk me out of it.” Cytherea says. “I know it was terribly selfish of me, but I needed to go back there, and stop anyone else from doing what we did, and I knew if I told you, you’d tell me I was being foolish and suicidal and point out all the problems with my plan, and I simply couldn’t bear that. So I didn’t tell you. And I’m not sorry, but I do regret that I made your life more difficult.” 

“Well, it all worked out in the end.” You say eventually. “Or rather, absolutely nothing worked out, but it never would’ve anyway, so I suppose you didn’t do any real harm.” 

Cytherea smiles at you. “So are we friends again?”

“Certainly not.” You reply primly. “We were never friends to begin with. I still think you’re a fool and a gadabout, and that hat is ridiculous.” 

And Cytherea laughs, and you continue to row. 

* * *

It’s not long, maybe another day of rowing, before you find yourself banked next to what looks like a large whirlpool, growing off the side of the River like a tumor. You make camp across from it at Cytherea’s direction, and then glance over to her.

“So what do we do now?” You ask.

“Now,” Cytherea replies with a smile, “we go fishing.” 

This was the kind of portentous statement that was clearly meant to conclude the discussion, but it also didn’t answer fucking anything, and so you continued your line of questioning. “Fishing for what, exactly? And why here? And with what?” 

Cytherea gave you a withering look. “For Augustine. And it’s not really  _ we _ , as it were. You’re going to have to draw him out.” 

“You’re fucking joking.” You say. “First of all, he hates me-”

“Yes but he hates you in a sexy way-”

You hiss like a cat and lunge for her, but she successfully evades.

“You’ve been in each other’s presence more, and you know each other better. It’ll be easier for him to follow your thanergetic signature up, and anyway I’m not strong enough to actually get him in the boat. It has to be you, Joy.” 

“I hate this.”

“How nice for you.” 

“And I hate you.” 

“You’ve mentioned that before I think.” 

“And I hate…” you search around for a third target for your ire, “this boat. It’s ugly, and the wood smells funny.” 

Cytherea doesn’t have a comeback for that one, which you count as a victory, and you turn away to go fishing.

* * *

You grow out your median nerve, wrapping it with muscle and adding a bone hook, then send it down into the depths. It’s not exactly comfortable, but that’s never been a priority for you. And then you wait.

You’d been fishing once before, with Cristabel. She hadn’t had the patience for it, had fidgeted too much to attract any fish, but you’d puppeted the fish to her hook anyway, and she’d been so pleased. Contrary to what Augustine liked to say, Cristabel was not all that easily pleased. She put on a good front, but anyone who bothered to really know her could tell that it was mostly for show. She never could bear for anyone to be upset on her account, even when she was hurting. That day by the lake though, you’d had the rare privilege of witnessing Cristabel Oct’s genuine smile, and it shone brighter than Dominicus.

She’d smiled at you like that on the day she died. 

You do your best to staunch the bleeding on that particular train of thought, and before too terribly long you feel a twinge at the end of your rope. 

You yank hard, and whatever is attached to you hook yanks back, but you are a good deal more stubborn, and you begin to pull up your rope. 

The first thing to breach the surface of the water is wearing the shape of a little girl, maybe twelve years old, in a pink dress long since rotted to bits. For a moment you stare at each other, and then she cocks her head at you and smiles.

Her mouth splits open, and keeps splitting. 

“Well fuck me running.” You say, and yank as hard as you can on the fishing line, right as the little ghost-girl lunges, and tears into the meat of your shoulder. 

You feel something surface above the water, but you can’t really focus on that right now, because the ghost-girl is tearing into you and biting  _ down _ . You grow bone spines out from your injured shoulder and arm, hoping to puncture something vital, but she wraps her skinny hands around one and starts  _ yanking them out _ . You claw at her with your good arm, and manage to yank her head back hard enough to get most of her teeth out of your flesh, but she’s still tearing at you, digging her tiny hands into your muscles and trying to rip them out. 

You grit your teeth on a scream and flood your system with cortisol and adrenaline to keep fighting, and then the ghost grabs your throat with her hands and  _ squeezes,  _ and you can feel the bones of your throat snapping like twigs, and you make a knife of bone with your good arm and stab at her wildly but she’s too fast, too fast, and-

And then she is ripped off of you abruptly and sent flying. She lands in the water several yards away and sinks like a stone into the dark water. 

Augustine the First is holding onto the edge of your boat, with your hook embedded in his shoulder, looking like absolute shit. Chunks of his flesh are missing, exposing bone in several places. His face is shattered, one eye dripping down his ruined cheek like tears. As you watch, his shattered cheekbone begins to shift back in his place, and the horrible mess of his eyeball reforms. He winks at you.

“Took you long enough.” He croaks. You slump back down onto the bottom of the boat, and force a laugh through your shattered throat. 

* * *

Cytherea flings herself at Augustine when she sees him, and he spins her around and dips her down for a lingering kiss. You scoff loudly, but they ignore you.

“You look absolutely marvelous, darling.” Augustine tells her when they finally break apart. “I hope our Flower of Joy hasn’t been treating you too roughly.”

“Not  _ too _ roughly,” Cytherea replies with a conspiratorial wink, and you debate the merits of simply walking into the River and letting the revenants have you. You decide that it’s unfair to punish yourself for the failings of others, and instead turn your attention to elaborate fantasies of flinging Augustine back into the depths. 

“Are we all properly reunited then?” You ask. “Can we get on with whatever grand, mysterious mission we’re on.” 

“Yes, what exactly is it we’re doing?” Augustine asks Cytherea, who pulls out one of her patented Mysterious Smiles, and gets back into the boat. 

“You’ll see.” 

Augustine turns to you and rolls his eyes. “Has she been like this the whole time?”

“You have no idea.” You reply conspiratorially, and you smile at each other with exasperated fondness before you both snap out of it and realize who it is you’re talking to. 

Augustine clears his throat, and says, somewhat lamely, “well then.”

You wait, but he doesn’t seem to have anything else to say, so you nod, and the two of you get into the boat. 

You thrust the oars at Augustine. “It’s your turn to row.”

“I’ve been being torn apart by unspeakable horrors in the depths of the River for ages.” Augustine protests. “I am not going to row the boat!” 

You stare at him unblinking, and for the first time in your long, long life, Augustine looks away first. He takes the oars from you silently, carefully not touching your hands as he does, and you look at him in naked surprise. You were expecting, and in truth sort of hoping for, the inevitable screaming match that came from being around him for more than twelve and a half minutes, as Cassiopeia had once precisely timed.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work.” He says after several hours of contemplative silence. 

“Fuck off.” You reply automatically, and are shocked when he doesn’t even attempt a rejoinder.

“It was a shitty plan anyway.” You say eventually. “But now we know.” 

“Right.” Augustine says.

“Well I think that atomizing God was a brilliant plan in theory.” Cytherea says with the forced brightness of someone at an extremely awkward dinner party. “It’s just a shame that he went and killed you afterwards.”

Augustine smiles tensely. For the rest of the day, you catch him glancing at you out of the corner of his eye when he thinks you aren’t looking, like he’s scared you’ll disappear. 

* * *

You are utterly unsurprised when Cytherea crawls into Augustine’s lap almost immediately after you stop for the night, but you don’t expect her to grab your wrist when you try to leave them to it. 

“No, wait.” She says. “Stay.”

You look at Augustine over her shoulder, and he looks back at you with the wide, startled eyes of a cornered animal. You’d be more pleased to see the expression on his face if you didn’t have a sneaking suspicion that you looked equally panicked. 

Cytherea sighs. “You know I’m trying to be sensitive of your  _ issues-” _

Augustine made a noise like a tea kettle whistling.

“-but I refuse to be in a boat with you two if you’re going to spend all your time staring at each other and moping. Now I’ve given you one option for how to solve your problem,” she says this last while grinding down onto Augustine, who makes a noise like he’s been punched and grasps, white-knuckled, at her hip. “Or I suppose you could scream at each other or try to kill each other or whatever it is you two do instead of fucking, as long as you stop being so goddamned  _ weird. _ ”

You and Augustine are still staring at each other, and so you can see the moment that Augustine stops seeing your blown-apart corpse and starts seeing  _ you _ , because it’s the same moment his eyes light up with challenge. 

“Well, Mercy?” He asks, like he wasn’t fully a deer in the headlights just seconds earlier, but you’ve played threesome chicken with him before, and you haven’t lost once. 

You yank his head back and kiss him, biting down hard on his tongue when he tries to slip it into your mouth. Cytherea tugs on your wrist until you join them on the ground, and then you bite her too, because you’re a spiteful bitch even at the best of times, and then Cytherea’s hands are under your shirt and Augustine’s mouth is on her neck and you’re scrabbling for any piece of them you can hold to yourself, and you stop thinking for awhile. 

* * *

And so the three of you settle into a rhythm. You and Augustine still hate each other, but it’s a steady, settled kind of hate, the kind of foundation you could’ve built a life on, in better circumstances. 

Cytherea simpers and fusses and snipes at the both of you, and you threaten to tip her out of the boat and into the River almost every day, but you also let her sing her ridiculous rowing songs and play with your hair and, horror of horrors, cuddle. You have refused your namesake in all of it’s forms for a myriad, but you find yourself content for the first time in a very long time. Perhaps even since there were sixteen of you. 

It ends, as everything in your life does, very abruptly. 

It’s Augustine’s turn to row, and you and Cytherea are amusing yourselves by throwing bone chunks from the last skeleton that had tried to climb in at him, while he swears at you in every language he knows. You’re perilously close to laughing when you see it in the distance. You sit bolt upright, nearly unbalancing the boat in the process.

“Cytherea.” 

“Yes Mercymorn?”

“Is that…?”

“Yes Mercymorn.”

Augustine turns to look, and promptly drops the oars into the River.

“Cytherea.”

“Yes Augustine?” 

“Are we…?”

“Yes Augustine.”

Your boat bumps up against the shore, and you and Augustine both jump. Cytherea smiles, sweeps her curls over one shoulder, and adjusts her sunhat so that it conveys the correct amount of gravitas. 

“Welcome to the Locked Tomb darlings. We’re here for the girl who will kill God.” She says, raising her arms to gesture at the grand stone in front of you. You try to prepare yourself to see Alecto again, but then Cytherea the First strikes the killing blow. “Harrowhark Nonagesimus.” 


End file.
